A Year in Reading: Garth Risk Hallberg

Related Books:

Last summer, several sheets to the wind, a novelist friend of mine and I found ourselves waxing nostalgic about 1997 – the year when Underworld, American Pastoral, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Mason & Dixon came out. (It was also probably the year both of us finished working our way through Infinite Jest, which had been published a year earlier.) Ah, sweet 1997. I was tempted to say that times like those wouldn’t come around again.

This year, however, Pisces must have been in Aquarius, or vice versa, or something. The number of novelists with a plausible claim to having published major work forms a kind of alphabet: Aira, Amis, Bolaño, Boyd, Carey, Cohen, Cunningam, Donoghue, Flaubert (by way of Davis), Grossman, Krauss, Krilanovich, Lee, Lipsyte, Marlantes, McCarthy, Mitchell, Moody, Ozick, Shriver, Shteyngart, Udall, Valtat, Yamashita… A career-defining omnibus appeared from Deborah Eisenberg, and also from Ann Beattie. Philip Roth, if the reviews are to believed, got his groove back. It even feels like I’m forgetting someone. Oh, well, it will come to me, I’m sure. In the meantime, you get the point. 2010 was a really good year for fiction.

Among the most enjoyable new novels I read were a couple that had affinities: Paul Murray‘s Skippy Dies and Adam Levin‘s The Instructions. (Disclosure: Adam Levin once rewired a ceiling fan for me. (Disclosure: not really.)) Each of these huge and hugely ambitious books has some notable flaws, and I wanted to resist them both, having developed an allergy to hyperintelligent junior high students. But each finds a way to reconnect the hermetic world of the ‘tween with the wider world our hopes eventually run up against. Murray and Levin are writers of great promise, and, more importantly, deep feeling, and their average age is something like 34, which means there’s likely more good stuff to come.

Another book I admired this year was Jennifer Egan‘s A Visit from the Goon Squad, but since everybody else did, too, you can readaboutit elsewhere in this series. Let me instead direct your attention to Matthew Sharpe‘s more modestly pyrotechnic You Were Wrong. Here Sharpe trains his considerable narrative brio on the most mundane of worlds – Long Island – with illuminating, and disconcerting, results. You Were Wrong, unlike The Instructions et al, also has the virtue of being short. As does Bolaño‘s incendiary Antwerp (or any of the several great stories in The Return). Or Cesar Aira’s wonderful Ghosts, which I finally got around to. Hey, maybe 2010 was actually the year of the short novel, I began to think, right after I finished a piece arguing exactly the opposite.

Then, late in the year, when I thought I had my reading nailed down, the translation of Mathias Énard‘s Zone arrived like a bomb in my mailbox. The synopsis makes it sounds like rough sledding – a 500-page run-on sentence about a guy on a train – but don’t be fooled. Zone turns out to be vital and moving and vast in its scope, like W.G. Sebald at his most anxious, or Graham Greene at his most urgent, or (why not) James Joyce at his most earthy, only all at the same time.

When it came to nonfiction, three books stood out for me, each of them a bit older. The first was Douglas Hofstadter‘s Gödel, Escher, Bach, an utterly unclassifiable, conspicuously brilliant, and criminally entertaining magnum opus about consciousness, brains, and formal systems that has been blowing minds for several generations now. The second was Alberto Manguel‘s 2008 essay collection, The Library at Night. No better argument for the book qua book exists, not so much because of what Manguel says here, but because the manner in which he says it – ruminative, learned, patient, just – embodies its greatest virtues. And the third was The Magician’s Doubts, a searching look at Nabokov by Michael Wood, who is surely one of our best critics.

And then there were my three favorite reading experiences of the year: Péter Esterházy’sCelestial Harmonies, a book about the chains of history and paternity and politics that reads like pure freedom; Dr. Faustus, which I loved less than I did The Magic Mountain, but admired more, if that’s even possible; and The Age of Innocence. Our own Lydia Kiesling has said pretty much everything I want to say about the latter, but let me just add that it’s about as close to perfection as you’d want that imperfect beast, the novel, to come. She was wild in her way, Edith Wharton, a secret sensualist, and still as scrupulous as her great friend Henry James. Like his, her understanding of what makes people tick remains utterly up-to-the-minute, and is likely to remain so in 2015, and 2035… by which time we may know about which of the many fine books that came out this year we can say the same thing. Ah, sweet 2010, we hardly knew ye.

With the year drawing to a close, so too is our Year in Reading series. We at The Millions would like to thank all of those who contributed to the series as well as all the helpful folks who assisted us in putting together such a great group of participants.Though we are undoubtedly biased, it was a thrill to watch the series unfold this year. We discovered that Joshua Henkinliked a book by Charles D’Ambrosio, who liked a book by Nam Le, who liked a book by Toni Morrison. We discovered that two highlyregarded authors (named Charles) were fans of Slash’s memoir this year. And we saw that many of our most admired writers were rediscovering (or discovering for the first time) literary legends like Saul Bellow, James Cain, Richard Brautigan, Anthony Trollope, Dostoevsky, Melville, and the aforementioned Toni Morrison.We’d also like to thank all of our readers for a great year at The Millions. It was another year with more visitors than we’ve ever had before, but the numbers alone shed little light on the best aspects of The Millions this year, which came through in the edifying and enlightening discussion spearheaded and spurred on by our readers, guests, and regular contributors.We’ll do a little roundup of some of the best posts at The Millions this year in a few days, but in the meantime, we’re going to take a breather from the breakneck pace of A Year in Reading.As we enjoy the last few days of 2008, we invite all of you to take part in A Year in Reading by finishing this sentence in the comments or on your own blog: “The best book I read all year was…”

2 comments:

Your enthusiasm for reading is infectious. And that comes from a guy already pretty well fixated on reading pleasure. I say hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!, and I’m not even British. I appreciate your humility (we all need more of that) regarding whether this was a year of the long novel/short novel. Who the hell cares? In my view. If the story requires length to find its full and brilliant radiance, so be it. If it packs a punch in 126 pages, then here’s a bravo for any writer wise enough to stop the train at the next depot.. You’ve prompted interest in Sharp and Levin, and Gawd I need to read Tolstoy! Well done chap.

In January I went to Barcelona alone on vacation and took Elena Ferrante’sThe Days of Abandonment with me. I knew little about Ferrante other than she is a mysterious figure in Italian literature, and that few people know her real identity. That, perhaps more than anything else, intrigued me, and seemed appropriate for my solo journey.

It was a bittersweet trip. I was supposed to travel with a friend for her 40th birthday – she had always dreamed of going to Barcelona, and had a lot of the trip planned out for us – but her mother fell very ill at the last minute, and so I ended up going by myself, on what felt like someone else’s vacation. It was nice to be in the sunshine during the month of January and there is much to admire about Barcelona, but I was sad for my friend, and for her mother, and a little sad for myself because I felt lonely, and then it was suddenly not that much of a stretch to start thinking about how I was going to die alone, you know, someday, and then I felt guilty for feeling sad when it was clear only my friend and her mother were the ones who were allowed to feel that way. So not only was I on a trip but also on a head trip as well. (Congratulations me.)

And so it was perfect to sink into the dark, blunt lunacy of the book’s narrator, Olga, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two who has recently been abandoned by her husband. In short order, she starts to fall apart. She swings wildly from self-pity to depression to anger and back again. She obsesses about her ex-husband’s sex life. She curses a lot, and is occasionally violent. She acts irresponsibly toward her children. She would almost be unlikeable, but the writing is so lucid and intense and funny that it is impossible not to live inside her head and be sympathetic to what she is going through. The rage she felt was deeply satisfying, and the climactic moments of the book made me sweat with worry. “I had to react, had to take charge of myself,” Ferrante writes. “Don’t give in, I said to myself, don’t crash headlong.” I felt clean when I had finished the book. I felt relieved. It is a book that gives you perspective.